Dr. Robert Cialdini

Dr. Robert Cialdini is a social psychologist, Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, and the author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and Pre-Suasion. His books have sold more than 12 million copies in 52 languages. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2019) and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2018), and the founder of the Cialdini Institute.

He is known for identifying the principles of persuasion: the reasons people say yes, established through decades of experiments and field research. He described them in Influence (1984), which became one of the most widely read books on persuasion, and extended the work in Pre-Suasion (2016), on what happens in the moment before a request.

Reciprocity, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Authority, Liking, Scarcity and Unity. The first six appeared in Influence in 1984; Unity was added in the 2021 New and Expanded edition.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984; New and Expanded edition 2021), Influence: Science and Practice, Pre-Suasion (2016), and, with co-authors, Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive (2008) and The Small BIG (2014).

He earned his B.S. in Psychology at the University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina, with post-doctoral training at Columbia University. He spent his career at Arizona State University, where he is Regents' Professor Emeritus, and held visiting appointments at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, Ohio State, the University of California and the Annenberg School of Communications.

Start with the free guide to each principle on this site. For a structured course, the Cialdini Method teaches all seven principles in 21 hours of self-paced video with Dr. Cialdini, and the POP® Workshop teaches them in person over two days.